Once every 375 years.
Apparently, that is how often on average, any single point on earth will experience a total eclipse of the heart sun. And Bonnie Tyler died last month, aged 75. But while that is rare, a solar eclipse happens a few times a year somewhere on earth, and tonight it was visible where I live, covering around 85% of the sun.
As it is Smallsteps' birthday tomorrow, we will make her a special breakfast before school, but tonight we made "poke bowls" (we didn't have sushi rice - only basmati), and we sat outside eating in the cool air as I said I had something special to show her. And then - the trees were in the way. So after eating, I piled us into the car and drove all the way around the corner (thought we would have to go higher) to see the eclipse already in action, but before it got to its deepest point.
Smallsteps was unimpressed.
(I have heard that other children were equally underwhelmed).
Kids today.
These photos look better on my phone than uploaded here.
Not too much, but better. I wasn't planning on taking photos until the last minute and only grabbed a shorter 150mm lens, instead of a 300. I also was unsure what settings to use to shoot the sun, but I guess bad photos are better than no photos. The main reason for the camera though was so we could see the eclipse, without burning out our retinas. There were a couple other people we saw, one with proper viewing glasses, a kid who had made his own refraction viewer out of a milk carton, and an older man walking down the street wearing a welding mask.
It was nice to see some people putting in effort.
Isn't it interesting how modern culture has become so complacent and desensitized, that something that used to scare the bejebus out of people to the point they thought the world was ending, has now become a non-event. At least for me, while not the same feeling as seeing the northern lights (which I love seeing), it was still something special. I still remember going outside at night in 1986 and barely seeing Halley's comet, and it felt special too. I was definitely not an "is that it?" kid at the time and wonder is it me, or have kids changed?
I suspect the latter.
Maybe it is because there is so much content stimulus all the time and the most amazing things are on-demand viewable, that rare natural events no longer capture the attention. And it makes me wonder what happens if nothing really captures the attention of kids anymore, what inspiration do they get and what drive do they have to do something like become an astronaut. Not many will actually be an astronaut, but those kinds of dreams also leads to the thousands of people in the engineering teams that help those astronauts get to space, and back again.
But maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe kids don't need to be inspired, because artificial intelligence and robotics will do all they can do, and much more. Which also the raises the question, why should a kid go to school and learn skills that they will never be able to apply in any meaningful way? Isn't it now just more busywork, considering no company is going to hire them?
In a few short years, we will have eclipsed ourselves.
Taraz
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